On Wednesday 17 June 2009, David C. Rankin wrote:
Listmates,
For the avid tinkerer and opensuse devotẽ note that the loss of a single exhaust fan can cause internal case temps to skyrocket and the addition of a single exhaust fan where none existed before can drop internal temps by close to 20 deg. C. An additional note is separating/staggering/spacing hard drives in your hard drive carrier within the case, leaving an empty drive bay open between each hard drive can have the same cooling effect. Both solutions are near zero cost and help fight the worst enemy to the life of your computer/server -- heat.
I routinely check drive temps using the package hddtemp called from a simple script that will check all drives and give a single line readout of the temperature of each drive:
#!/bin/bash for i in $(cat /proc/partitions | egrep sd[abcdefgh]$ | sed -e 's/^.*s/s/'); do hddtemp /dev/$i done
I just put the script in /usr/local/bin as 'hdtemp' and call it from cron with an email sent to myself.
Yesterday, I noticed the drive temps on a file server had jumped 18 degrees C to:
/dev/sdb: ST3250410AS: 55°C /dev/sdc: ST3250410AS: 56°C
Drive manufacturers routinely recommend not exceeding 60 deg. C, but a number of independent test have shown that keeping drive temps below 43 deg. C is more or less the gold standard with drive lifetime dropping rather sharply above 45 degrees.
In my case, the culprit was the rear exhaust fan on the case. Simply replacing the 80mm fan brought the airflow in the case back up to normal and the drive temps back down to a reasonable level:
/dev/sdb: ST3250410AS: 37°C /dev/sdc: ST3250410AS: 40°C
You can find hddtemp here:
10.3 - repositories/home:/houghi/openSUSE_10.3 11.0 & 11.1 - packman
Give it a try and see how your cooling measures up. 10 degrees can make a big difference in drive life.
I've been doing this for years.. Both cases have fans that pull in air from outside and blow directly over the drives. In the one case I can actually touch the drives, they never even get warm to the touch.. Mike -- Powered by SuSE 11.0 Kernel 2.6.25 KDE 3.5 Kmail 1.9 7:49pm up 1 day 0:18, 3 users, load average: 3.37, 3.34, 3.38 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org